The Internet provides access to a wide variety of information. For example, digital image files, video and/or audio files, as well as web page resources for particular subjects, are accessible over the Internet. With respect to web page resources, many of these resources are designed to facilitate the performing of particular actions, such as booking restaurant reservations, booking hotel reservations, purchasing tickets, playing videos, shopping, etc. Furthermore, with the advent of tablet computers and smart phones, native application resources that facilitate the performance of the similar functions are now being provided in large numbers. Search engines now also facilitate searching of these resources—both web page and native applications—by crawling and indexing these resources. The content of the resources is typically identified during an indexing process and stored in an index in a manner that facilitates the searching of the content in response to search queries.
One process by which search engines gather information for native applications is by accessing “deep links” for native applications. A deep link is an instruction specifying a particular environment instance of a native application and configured to cause the native application to instantiate the environment instance of the specified native application when selected at a user device. The native application generates the environment instance for display within the native application on a user device. For example, a deep link may specify a selection menu for a game environment; or a particular selection of a song for a music application; or a particular recipe for a cooking application; and the like.